SOME GRAVE MISSIONARY PROBLEMS.
By Rev. A. T. Pierson
[Rev. A. T. Pierson in Missionary Review of the World.] (1) THE calculating or mathematical spirit, that coolly calculates whether or not missions pay financially. It puts in one scale the money annually spent and in the other scale the number of converts annually gathered, and weighs one over against the other. Such a method applied to a work commanded by God is itself close akin to blasphemy. Money it is possible to weigh, but who can weigh a soul? On the triple doorways of the Cathedral of Milan are graven three inscriptions. On one side, with all the emblems of plenty and pleasure: "All that pleases us is but for a moment." Opposite, with all the symbols of pain and anguish: "All that afflicts us is but for a moment." In the middle, over the fadeless crown: "That only is important which is eternal." All temporal good, however desirable, is still temporal. The earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up, while he that doeth the will of God abideth forever. The story of missions is a sufficient answer to such financial arguments. Take one example—Livingstone's body-guard, Susi and Chuma. When they found him dead on his knees in that grass hut at Ilala, they took out his heart and buried it under the moula tree, as the inalienable property of Africa; then rudely embalming the body, wrapped it in bark and canvass and lashed it to a pole, and undertook that greatest funeral march on record, running all manner of risks for forty weeks by day and night. They had to pass through hostile tribes nearly every fifty miles, involving new risk. That journey of fifteen hundred miles demanded all the patience of indomitable love and the sagacity of the most competent generalship. Yet, depending on God, the deed was done, and so the remains of the great missionary general, statesman, and explorer were laid to rest in England's grand Abbey. Do missions pay? That black man, Susi, whose hand was upon the pall, was fully the equal in nobility of any of the noblemen that helped bear that sacred load; yet Susi was the fruit of missions; and had all the life-blood and treasure spent on African soil wrought no other result than to give such a hero birth, it would be a full compensation. (2) The Caste Spirit.—This as really exists in such countries as Great Britain and the United States of America, as in India; it may not be as rigid, but in some cases it is as unquestionable and insurmountable. The cellular structure of society is such that cells do not interpenetrate. Two great facts which are both obvious and conspicuous are sufficient to prove this. The intense race prejudice and hatred, which exists toward the colored inhabitants of our country and toward the Chinese emigrants on the one hand, and class separation and antagonism as between poor and rich, capitalists and laborers, everywhere exemplified in society—these are sufficient illustrations both to vindicate and illustrate the affirmation that the spirit of caste is by no means confined to the East Indies or Isles of the Sea. We have our "tabu" system as certainly as the Cannibal Islands of the Pacific. One of the most startling proofs of the malignity of this spirit is found in the amazing growth of lynching and similar acts of violence, especially among the people of the South, in this great republic. In a letter to the Springfield Republican the eminent Harvard psychologist, Prof. William James, described the lynching spirit as a profound social disease that is so rapidly spreading that "we shall have negro burning in a very few years on Cambridge Common and in the Boston Public Garden." Professor James' letter was hardly published before the report of the lynching in Danville, Ill., afforded a lurid verification of his prophecy in a northern town—the home of the man who has been selected by the Republicans as the speaker of the House of Representatives, a town that has hitherto been regarded as a center of light and leading for the eastern part of central Illinois. No doubt, at the bottom of this lynching there is much latent race hatred, as most of the victims were blacks. But in connection with this is undoubtedly a still more dangerous defiance and contempt of law. The old triangular contest is upon us; infidelity and irreligion at the opposite angles of the base, and the common apex in which each naturally culminates—disregard of both human and divine law. The evil is deep-rooted, and the appetite for cruelty in connection with these acts of violence grows, like the tiger's taste of blood, into a maddening fury. Mary Cowden Clarke, in her book, "The Iron Cousin," represents her heroine as retiring from Christian work among the slums because she "can not stand the poor smell." Mrs. Rhea, formerly of Persia, has graphically told how, when she first went into those Persian huts and sat down on the earth floor among those filthy and ragged women, she was thankful for the almost naked condition of the children, because the less clothing the less room for vermin to hide. . . . She tells how she went home, threw herself down on the floor of her room, and said: "O my God, I never can work among these women without a new baptism of love for them." Thousands of people are kept from Christian work at home by the repulsion which they feel toward the ignorant and degraded, the poor and the unclean. More than this, in at least two cities where the writer has lived he has known Christian people of intelligence and culture, who have been so influenced by what may be called ideas of aristocratic locality that they would not pass the line of certain streets, even to engage in Christian work, or attend a missionary meeting. Vain is it for us to remonstrate against the caste spirit abroad, while such narrowness and meanness exists at home, often under the guise of piety. If we are going to carry on world-wide missions we must learn more sympathy with the immaculate Christ, who was the most "perfect gentleman" who ever trod the earth, and in comparison with whose refinement and delicacy our finest tastes are coarse; yet, who, nevertheless, passed His human life in the closest contact with the poorest and lowest and filthiest classes of Palestine, yet who never once betrayed any repulsion, save from hypocrites and formalists.